Hello again, in the previous video we looked at trust experiments and we introduced you to, the trust question, we also saw how through sampling it's possible to get results by asking a limited number of people. In this video we're going to review those results, and we will certainly question their reliability. Now the World Value Survey, is a veritable fount of information, and it's widely used in social science research. In every way, about 1,000 respondents are surveyed in 50 or more different countries. And some other question repeated in each wave. Trust question is one of those and its always been included, in the surveys from the very beginning. Let's refresh our minds again what it is. Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or, you cannot be too careful when dealing with other people? Now the director of the World Value Survey, has collated all the results into one single index in which he subtracted the percentage who answered you can't be too careful, from the ones who answered most people can be trusted and added the sum to 100. Basically, results above 100 indicated that society was on balance, trustful. Whereas, below 100, there were a majority urging caution in dealing with others. Now, before the most recent wave only about 25% of those questioned, believe that most people could be trusted. Well, in April 2014, the latest results were published covering 56 countries, five of them for the first time. Of the 122 larger countries for which data is available, only 11 have a majority of respondents willing to urge that you can trust your fellow citizen. Let's have a look at these in a little more detail. Topping the list are in order Norway, The Netherlands, and Denmark, Sweden and Finland come in, in fifth and sixth place respectively. So this groups together the prosperous medium size northern European welfare states. New Zealand, Switzerland and Australia also have a majority of trusting respondents. I'm sure you can all think of several reasons why these countries should share these characteristics. You most certainly will by the end of this course. Now, splitting these countries are three others. China comes in in fourth place. Saudi Arabia and Vietnam are ninth and tenth place respectively. Now there is a tendency among some social scientists to treat these countries as outliers, genuine but freak results that fall outside the expected pattern, and to exclude them from their analysis. They're all effectively one party states with strong continuity in leadership. They're all relatively homogenous. And they're all societies with strong state control over the media. But there are plenty of other states with these characteristics at well that do not produce trusting respondents. Now, we'll look through the rest of the results in the visualization at the end of this video. Now, in looking at the outcomes, I want to start by asking some questions you should ask of any survey data. And then we'll raise one question specifically about this set of trust data. Now the first question you need to ask is whether the sample size is large enough. Well, even for data sets of less than 20 there are statistical tests of probability for their accuracy. And all social scientists would agree that 1,000 is really a pretty large sample. So that's not a problem. The second question we need to ask is whether the sample itself is random, is the survey random in design and are the respondents chosen at random? Looking through the technical notes on the survey, I was a little uncomfortable when it described the possibility in having to choose a handful of respondents from two villages. One large and one small. They would actually allocate more places to the larger village. But the survey said that was all. But even then you shouldn't be doing that. Now, my suspicions became more solid when I read at the top of the collated results the following, all data should be taken with care. Since the sample distributions by education and other social democraphic variables in some countries, may diverge substantially from their respective population distribution. Now that is a big problem. A bigger problem lies with whether the respondents are random. Taking apart in a survey like this is not something you undertake lightly. There are over 200 questions, many of them requiring you to rank opinions on a graded list of 1 to 5. It's going to take a couple of hours. So you may ask your respondents randomly but they don't agree to participate randomly. When my students in Beijing did a small two minute survey, some people deliberately walked away to avoid the students all together. But 40% of those who did stop, refused to take part. Now, who are they? Are they ones without time, or are they ones who don't trust surveys? And if they're the ones that don't trust, so, really a sample survey is only a sample of those willing to be surveyed. Now a third question, is whether responses actually have an opinion on a specific issue at all. I mean an answer is dragged out of them regardless. But after a while, in two hours, you're going to go on automatic pilot or you're going to start giving the answers, that you think the questioner would like to hear. And the phenomenon intensifies the longer the survey gets, because for many questions, I think the answer is probably, I haven't got a clue, I haven't thought about it. Let's take a question 11, for example. Quote, here is a list of qualities that children can be encouraged to learn at home. Which, if any, do you consider to be especially important? Please choose up to five. And then they hold up a list, independence, hard work, feeling of responsibility, imagination, tolerance and respect of other people, thrift and saving money, determination, perseverance, religious faith, unselfishness, obedience, self expression. You got an opinion on that? Well, there's 200 more to come. Now there's a final problem specifically to the trust question. What was the question? You've seen it. Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted, or you cannot be too careful dealing with other people? But who are the other people in the question? Now a survey in the United Kingdom asked exactly this supplementary question, and it found that those who answered that you could trust other people 40% of them had known people in mind, and only 20% thought of people outside their closed-circle groups. Those who urged caution, the numbers were reversed. When my students repeated the exercise in a pilot survey in Beijing, they found exactly the same pattern. So within the trust survey the people are in fact answering not one question but two different questions. So lets sum up then. In this video we introduced you to the World Value Survey. And we looked at the results of the trust question, the trusting end of the spectrum. We also examine some of the problems involved in trusting the trust results. In the next video, we'll see what assumptions social scientists have made about trust, and which hypotheses have they developed on the causes and effect of trust in different levels of society. Meanwhile, I invite you to take a look at the visualization of the world map of trust that we've prepared.
